As the mobile wideband technologies are advancing dramatically, the amount of data traffic is growing significantly, and there is also an increasing amount of data in various indoor and outdoor hotspot scenarios. A traditional macro cell suffers from a bottleneck of network deployment and coverage, and in order to provide deep network coverage and to improve the capacity of the network while considering a cost factor, operators pay more attention to a small cell.
FIG. 1 illustrates a network architecture of small cells in the prior art, where the small cells access a transmission network, and are connected with a core network, after being aggregated by a switch. The core network includes a Security Gateway (Se-GW), a signaling gateway (He-NB Gateway (He-GW)), an Evolved Packet Core (EPC), and other devices. A Mobile-Edge Computing (MEC) server is connected in series between the small cells and the core network, and accesses local traffic using a Traffic Offload Function (TOF) function.
However in a real application, the small cells are assets of the operators, operate in licensed frequency bands of their operators, and are generally deployed in indoor scenarios, e.g., a supermarket, a museum, an airport, etc. There are certainly users of a plurality of operators in various application scenarios, and in order to provide the users of all the operators with a network service, the different operators set up their own networks respectively and provide their respective users with a network service respectively in a small cell based user access solution in the prior art.
However in this solution, there are a large number of small cell devices belonging to the different operators in the same area. Furthermore as there are more different operators, there are more related devices, and more overlapping networks are set up, so it is more difficult to deploy the devices. This solution also comes with serious interference between the networks, thus degrading the experiences of the users.
In another small cell based user access solution in the prior art, a small cell device is shared, that is, the device is invested and set up by one operator, and leased to another operator while providing its own users with a satisfactory service.
However in this solution, firstly the shared small cell device shall be able to access the core networks of the different operators, so the small cell shall be highly functional; secondly the shared small cell device shall set up Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) tunnels with the security gateway devices of the different operators for the sake of security, and if there are a plurality of such tunnels, then the processing capacity thereof will drop seriously, so that it may not satisfy a normal service usage requirement; thirdly if the users of the operators access the shared small cell device, then the number of small cells deployed in a unit area will increase dramatically, thus making it difficult for the operators to manage and maintain the small cells; and lastly a business mode for sharing and leasing a small cell involves bargaining on and negotiation about a number of items between the operators, so it is difficult to carry out the business mode in practice.
Apparently in the small cell based user access solutions in the prior art, a small cell can only be accessed by a user of an operator thereof, but cannot be accessed by the users of all the operators; and it is difficult to configure a shared small cell to serve the users of all the operators.